1. 4. How did you use media technologies in the construction and research,
planning and evaluation stages?
I used various types of software in the construction, research and planning, and
evaluation stages, such as Prezi, Bubbl, Facebook, Slideshare, Photoshop, Final
Cut and Pinterest. These were used to plan out what was going to be completed
for the music video e.g. the locations for filming, costume, song choice and target
audience.
With Prezi, this helped me to put my ideas down visually which allowed me to
explain the images of existing media products in more detail. This was helpful
when sharing and presenting ideas to the group or to the target audience to
collect feedback. This software also helped me to compare different music videos
and digipak/magazine advertisement designs more effectively as I could
annotate around them and describe the different aspects of the designs.
Although this helped me to share my ideas, it also helped to
Bubbl helped me to plan each separate stage of my planning stage, including
costume, actors, props, narrative and location. It also help me to organise my
thoughts out more equally instead of it all being together in 1 block of
information. Bubbl helped me to see each separate part of the project and how
they connected together. I explained each section in detail on Bubbl. For
example, I used a separate bubble to talk about the actors and why I had decided
to use both a younger and an older girl for the music video. This is also the same
for the bubble I used to talk about location. I talked about revisiting locations to
film parts of the music video again as well as the types of props that could be
used. This helped me to get more of an idea of what I wanted to be involved in
the music video.
Facebook let me share my ideas with our focus group and my group to see what
could be added or improved to my media products. For example, I uploaded a
screenshot of my disk design for my digipak and collected a few pieces of
feedback on it. This helped me to develop my ideas and make my product better.
It was necessary to use Facebook as social networking is such a huge part of the
communication sector of our world today so this is really useful in the fact that it
is easy to use, giving people access to it anywhere. This also means people were
able to give me feedback on Facebook wherever they were at the time they
viewed the pieces I uploaded.
Pinterest let me create a visual representation of what I wanted my artist to look
like. I used my focus group findings to decide on the costume she would perhaps
wear in our music video. It really helped me to visualise what I wanted for that
as well as the location too. It helped to make the idea of our music video more
realistic so we had a clear view of what was needed for filming the video and also
to help think about the types of clothes we wanted our artist to wear in detail.
Slideshare was also a great piece of software which let me upload Powerpoint
and Word documents so they were much easier to view on the blog. It also
created a more organised look/layout.

2. As well as the software used in the research and planning stages, as a group we
used Final Cut to create our music video. This program was difficult to use at first
but we overcame these obstacles by learning about the program and what types
of techniques we could use to make our music video look as professional as
possible. I learnt several different effects and skills within this piece of software
such as transitions and colour correcting. I colour corrected the clips in our
music video as it helped to make the video slightly more brighter in some of the
clips which were darker than others. I also used transitions to make the clips in
our music video blend together more smoothly as this helped to create a more
professional look for our video. We also layered clips over each other so they
also blended together smoothly, such as what the transitions helped to do.
Although I used Final Cut to create our music video, I also used Adobe Photoshop
to create my digipak and my magazine advert. This software helped me to create
professional looking designs with the images I took of our artist. I used several
different tools that were available to me on Photoshop such as the lasso tool.
This tool helped me select a piece of my images, copy it, and then layer it on top
of anything on my designs. I could also level out different colours on the images I
used on my digipak and magazine advertisement. This helped to make images
that weren't lighted correctly to look better than they originally did.
Overall, I used various media technologies in all 3 stages of creating my products.